Prime (Minister) real estate
Legendary PM Pitt the Younger would have loved this sympathetic renovation, says Gary Parkinson
When you were at school, what did you think you’d be doing at the age of 24? For most people the answer probably wasn’t “being Prime Minister” – but then most people weren’t William Pitt the Younger, whose gorgeous Georgian townhouse in Bath is now on the market.
Pitt’s father was also William, as his lad’s suffix suggests, but he was also Prime Minister, in the 1760s – so young William, born in 1759, was used to high achievement casting long shadows. Elected as an MP at 21, he took the top job three years later in 1783. Take that, pops.
Our house enters the story in 1789, and what an entrance. Bath was already the centre of the new Georgian architecture – all symmetry and proportion, with restrained ornamentation creating elegance and balance – thanks to the work of another patronymic father-and-son team, John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger, laying out the burgeoning burgh on deliciously classical lines like the world-renowned Royal Crescent.
Robert Adam’s celebrated 1770 Pulteney Bridge spanned the Avon and opened up Bathwick for development, so in 1789 architect Thomas Baldwin designed the whole of Johnstone Street, crowned by this grand five-storey house. Its prominent facade forms part of the symmetry graciously surrounding the Laura Place fountain. (In case you’re wondering, Johnstone was the birth surname of the baronet whose heiress wife Frances Pulteney inherited the area, prompting this development and his adoption of her surname; Laura was their daughter’s middle name.)
While the front of the house overlooks that fountain, the rear luxuriates in a southwest-facing view over Pulteney Bridge, one of only a handful of bridges in Europe to support shops. Architect Robert Adam modelled it on Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, and the comparison is apt, with a similarly bourgeois clientele seeking life’s finer things.
But back to the house, now Grade I-listed and sensitively restored to premier condition with the retention of several original features. Beyond the double frontage, a superb cantilevered stone staircase swishes you upwards through the floors – no mean journey in a house blessed with exceptional ceiling heights demarcated by decorative cornicing and matched by tall sash windows (tastefully shuttered).
Light also drenches the staircase via the huge skylight atop the entrance lobby, drawing you upward through this storied building. The ground floor has a reception room, a 5.05 x 3.95m dining room big enough for a 12-seater table, and a 6.19 x 5.08m kitchen (with marble fireplace) with southwest aspect.
The first floor’s spectacular double-aspect drawing room can be halved by wedding doors: one part overlooks the front square, the other the Pulteney Bridge. There’s also a second study or bedroom. Up another flight is the master floor, with a voluminous 6.22 x 5.3m bedroom giving onto a luxe 5.11 x 4.1m bathroom with freestanding central bath; there’s also a large dressing room, with backlit shelves peering down upon an island display unit for sunglasses.
The third and fourth floors add another three beds and two baths, with the top-storey utility room doubling as a kitchen for a possible one-floor studio flat. From there, a staircase accesses the flat roof with 360-degree views over Bath’s spreading splendidness.
As you tiptoe cooingly through all this, you’ll also note the preponderance of period fireplaces to warm those vast rooms, replete as they are with double-pile carpets, restored wooden floors, hand-built oak wardrobes and bespoke wooden seats.
All this opulence would doubtless have pleased Pitt, who lived in the house from 1802. That was the year after he had resigned as Prime Minister, having been unable to persuade King George III to abolish restrictions on Roman Catholics over the water in the newly-established United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
He returned to power in 1804 and in total served as Prime Minister for 22 days shy of 19 years, making him Britain’s second longest serving PM after Sir Robert Walpole. But did it make him happy? Long plagued by ill health, he died in Putney in 1806 aged just 46, unmarried, childless and leaving debts of £40,000 (around £3.5m adjusted for inflation). Don’t worry about the family, though: he was succeeded as Prime Minister by his cousin, the 1st Baron Grenville...
• Pitt House, £3.4m, via sothebysrealty.co.uk
Originally published in Metro, 16 Nov 2021
